Green Design Industrial Revolution
In its time, the industrial revolution was hailed as the beginning of a new age--an age of progress, prosperity and productivity. Now, one man looks back on that revolution and sees a horrible mistake.
William A. McDonough, AIA, believes the success of the industrial revolution was measured with an inaccurate yardstick. Progress was equated with the number of smokestacks across a city skyline belching black pollution into the air. Prosperity was measured by how many materials went through the system and productivity by how few people were working. The result left society facing long-term ecological and economic problems.
It is time, says McDonough, to stage a second industrial revolution; one that measures progress by the number of smokestacks not seen across the skyline and that measures prosperity by how few raw materials are used and productivity by the number of people who are working. Hopefully, the result of this revolution will leave society with long-term ecological and economic benefits.
Who can and should be at the forefront of this revolution? Well, architects and designers, of course. As members of a profession responsible for the majority of the world's built environment--including everything from office buildings and homes to furniture and packaging--McDonough believes they are the natural choice for leading the way into what is essentially a new way of thinking.
To do this, McDonough says architects and designers must add two more important points to a typical list of design criteria.
"When designers are assigned a problem, they usually consider the three basic criteria that every student of design or architecture learns in school: cost, performance and aesthetics," says McDonough. "In other words: Can I afford it? Does it work? Do I like it? Now, designers also must ask whether what they are designing is ecologically intelligent and socially just. Is it safe? Can something really be beautiful if it destroys the earth or is unfair?"
There was a time not too long ago when McDonough received telephone calls asking him to stop linking the work of designers to the degradation of the environment. He was creating a liability for them, colleagues said, placing the onus on them to find affordable choices without compromising either aesthetics or the earth.
If we understand that design leads to the manifestation of human intention, and if what we make with our hands is to be sacred and honor the earth that gives us life, then the things we make must not only rise from the ground but return to it, soil to soil, water to water, so everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back without causing harm to any living system. This is ecology. This is good design."
McDonough spoke these words at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY, in a sermon entitled, "Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things." The idea behind these words can be reduced to a simple equation that McDonough developed: waste = food.
According to McDonough, as designers design, they must factor out the concept of waste. Just as in nature where living things die and become food for other living things, so man-made objects must imitate nature.
Thus, rather than thinking first of recycling, we should think of recycling last--that is, last in a series of activities that begins with redesign, says McDonough. Redesign, reduce, reuse, then recycle. (Fully 94 percent of what is marshaled to make things ultimately ends up in a landfill even with recycling, notes McDonough. Much of recycling is actually "down-cycling" in that highly sophisticated and refined man-made compounds are indescriminately combined into substances of lesser technical value. For example, the wide variety of highly engineered steel in automobiles is melted together and "down-cycled" into reinforcing steel for concrete construction.) Redesign will lead to less destruction of our natural resources and greater restoration, or what McDonough calls a "cradle to cradle" process rather than cradle to grave.
In order to be restorative, designers must put back what they take from the earth in the course of their work. Sometimes this takes creativity and ingenuity, but it can be done.
For example, when McDonough's firm designed a men's clothing store in New York City, they arranged to have 1,000 oak trees planted to replace the two English oaks used to panel the store. In designing the Heinz family offices in Pittsburgh, PA, McDonough used lesser known but sustainably harvested woods from the United States, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Ecuador and the Solomon Islands. And McDonough is currently working on a fabric for DesignTex that is compostable without adding to the soil persistent toxins, heavy metals, endocrine disruptors or bio-accumulatives. While in use, the fabric is natural and healthy--and remains so once returned to the ground.
"We worked with chemical engineers to redesign the process for making this fabric," explains McDonough. "That's what I mean by redesign. Designers must start seeing beyond just what something looks like to what it takes to make it. We have to stop irreverently ripping things out of the ground and by the same token we have to stop putting things in the ground that shouldn't be there."
To this end, McDonough is developing a three-pronged theory with Michael Braungart, an ecological chemist from Hamburg, Germany, which suggests there be only three types of products:
Consumables.
These are products that will return to the soil--not to landfills-- decompose and become food (organic nutrients) for the earth's natural living organisms.
Products of service or durables.
These products, such as cars, televisions and computers, would not be sold, but rather licensed to an end-user. When the item is no longer of service, the end-user would return it to the manufacturer who can then disassemble it and put the parts back into the manufacturing process where they become "food" (technical nutrients) for the system.
Unmarketables.
Production of these toxic and dangerous products should simply cease. And those that have already been produced should be stored in secure warehouses until someone can figure out how to safely dispose of them.
While the implementation of their new protocols may be some time away, architects and designers can make basic efforts today such as remembering where the sun is and using it properly. According to McDonough, when the production of large sheet glass coincided with the availability of cheap energy, architects forgot where the sun was. True, the glass brought in natural light, but it also heated buildings, which then required energy to cool them. McDonough says it now is time to deal accurately with the sun and use its natural energy flows.
"Solar energy comes to us each and every day," says McDonough. "It's not like fossil fuels that are finite and non-renewable. We should use the technology we have today to reap the sun's energy and we should also go back to the fundamentals of architecture which give simple directives like, 'don't build a house without a shade tree to the south.'"
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